Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids
5:19 PM, Wednesday November 24th 2021
Took a long time doing it. (yay uni exams)
Any feedback is more then welcome :)
Hi I'll critique your homework.
Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, you can improve them but try to stick to the characteristics of simple sausages as shown here.
Also you did a good job with your contour curves, but they're are some things you should keep in mind, I noticed some weirdness in terms of the way your contour lines on some of these shifted in their degree, wider or narrower, throughout the length of their given sausages. Don't try to increase there complexity of these as their just ways to reinforce the illusion of 3D, so have all of those contour curves facing the same direction.
Now moving to your insect constructions, there are cases where you'll try to attach a 2D shape to a 3D one, this is most easily seen in your Hercules beetle and weevil drawings, where you just attach a flat shape to the existing constructions, you should be thinking about how three protrusions exist in space.
You can see it in practice in this beetle horn demo and ant head demo.
Your use of the sausage method to draw the insects legs varies form case to case, so don't deviate from its specific requirements.The key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are - it is about laying in a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb in equal measure.
And a final note, keep using contour curves in all shapes that you draw, I see some drawings like the spider, the leafcutter and the leafhopper where you used very little contour lines.
Next Steps:
I'll ask you for 3-5 more constructions so that I can see how you improve. Good luck and sorry for any misspellings.
Hey SolonegociosSerios, thanks for the critique ^^) and sorry for the late reply, I first wanted to draw each redoes and submit them all at once, here they are: https://imgur.com/a/EgLAIgx.
Legs are the parts which are harder for me to draw, and while I think I drew them better this time, I still find them hard to draw, mainly in bending them.
I tried to make the insects as 3D looking as I could, and I think most of them feel a bit more 3D, the only insect that leaves me a bit dissatisfied is the treehopper, I thought to push myself with drawing a more complex insect but maybe it was a bit too much for me and it ended up a bit worse than the rest.
Anyway, thanks again for your previous critique I look forward to your reply!
No problem, time is a big factor when it comes to making this constructions, so take as much as you need to.
I see you are moving in the right direction here, also I wanted to make some clarifications, I highlighted above that you were using too little contour lines, a characteristic about contour curves/ellipses is that they can make a form feel more solid in its own right or in isolation, when we want to establish the relationship between two forms the best thing to do that is through the silhouette of these So keep that in mind, it is an important concept in the next lesson.
Now one important thing to point out is that in this drawing, you started with a simple form for the thorax, then went in to modify its silhouette just as you might have done for the leaves in lesson 3. So, why won't that same trick work for our forms here?. Leaves are already flat - so modifying their silhouette doesn't flatten them out more. When we do that to a form that already has its own volume however (or something that we want to feel voluminous), we do end up flattening it out. You could have tried to apply the principles that were shown in the demos I put above, like this (sorry I used Microsoft paint but you get the idea).
So to finish this critique, I want you to look at this demo of an ant leg, just make sure you start out with the sausages, precisely as the steps are laid out in that diagram - don't throw the technique out just because it doesn't immediately look like what you're trying to construct.
Next Steps:
Keep these thing in mind for the next lesson.
Let's be real here for a second: fineliners can get pricey. It varies from brand to brand, store to store, and country to country, but good fineliners like the Staedtler Pigment Liner (my personal brand favourite) can cost an arm and a leg. I remember finding them being sold individually at a Michael's for $4-$5 each. That's highway robbery right there.
Now, we're not a big company ourselves or anything, but we have been in a position to periodically import large batches of pens that we've sourced ourselves - using the wholesale route to keep costs down, and then to split the savings between getting pens to you for cheaper, and setting some aside to one day produce our own.
These pens are each hand-tested (on a little card we include in the package) to avoid sending out any duds (another problem with pens sold in stores). We also checked out a handful of different options before settling on this supplier - mainly looking for pens that were as close to the Staedtler Pigment Liner. If I'm being honest, I think these might even perform a little better, at least for our use case in this course.
We've also tested their longevity. We've found that if we're reasonably gentle with them, we can get through all of Lesson 1, and halfway through the box challenge. We actually had ScyllaStew test them while recording realtime videos of her working through the lesson work, which you can check out here, along with a variety of reviews of other brands.
Now, I will say this - we're only really in a position to make this an attractive offer for those in the continental United States (where we can offer shipping for free). We do ship internationally, but between the shipping prices and shipping times, it's probably not the best offer you can find - though this may depend. We also straight up can't ship to the UK, thanks to some fairly new restrictions they've put into place relating to their Brexit transition. I know that's a bummer - I'm Canadian myself - but hopefully one day we can expand things more meaningfully to the rest of the world.
This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.